As the pandemic shows, official numbers are often far lower than actual mortality, and this effect is probably much stronger now that COVID tests aren’t routine anymore.
I’d argue that most people with severe covid would seek medical attention once they started having difficulty breathing, so most covid deaths probably occur in hospitals, where covid tests are cheap and plentiful. So the internal numbers from hospitals are probably accurate.
This doesn’t prevent medical examiners who don’t “believe” in covid from changing the data, or moronic red states (cough Florida cough) from simply not reporting it.
Loads of people die from heart attack, stroke, etc which is triggered by COVID. These are common. It is not routine to order a COVID test in these cases, so the cases are almost definitely being undercounted.
This past week, 1.6% of all deaths in the United States were from covid.
*reported as due to COVID
As the pandemic shows, official numbers are often far lower than actual mortality, and this effect is probably much stronger now that COVID tests aren’t routine anymore.
I’d argue that most people with severe covid would seek medical attention once they started having difficulty breathing, so most covid deaths probably occur in hospitals, where covid tests are cheap and plentiful. So the internal numbers from hospitals are probably accurate.
This doesn’t prevent medical examiners who don’t “believe” in covid from changing the data, or moronic red states (cough Florida cough) from simply not reporting it.
Loads of people die from heart attack, stroke, etc which is triggered by COVID. These are common. It is not routine to order a COVID test in these cases, so the cases are almost definitely being undercounted.